


/r/dogs

by crossingwinter



Series: #kylothekiller [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Extremely Established Relationship, F/M, Unplanned Pregnancy, i don’t know what’s grosser:, mild sexual stuff but not in a bonery way but that’s what upped the rating, the vomiting or how ridiculously in love with one another they are, unplanned sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-23 19:13:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17086100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: [Help] My Girlfriend thinks she’s dying because the dog won’t leave her side





	/r/dogs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [porcelaindakota](https://archiveofourown.org/users/porcelaindakota/gifts).



> I should warn there’s like...a lot of vomit in this fic because morning sickness. If that grosses you out I apologize in advance. 
> 
> Morgan, the chaotic neutral who hasn’t even seen TLJ and who responsible for the first fic in this series, sent me [this link](https://www.reddit.com/r/dogs/comments/a13q75/help_dog_suddenly_very_attached_to_wife_and_wont/) on reddit with the comment “A sequel to your dog fic?” so here we are.
> 
> If you haven’t read the first, you don’t need to to understand what’s going on in this one, though it’s short and sweet and I’m proud of it and can only encourage you to read it. For those of you who did read that one, this is set several years after.
> 
> I am still just as much not a dog-owner now as I was when I wrote #kylothekiller so fingers crossed this is how dogs are maybe for real.

Ben wakes to Rey stumbling out of bed towards the bathroom and puking her guts up.  

It’s rare that Rey’s the one waking Ben.  She is the deepest sleeper he’s ever met. She usually doesn’t even stir when he extricates himself from her in the morning to walk Kylo.  He’s the light sleeper of the two of them.

So he gets up, rubbing his eyes as he hears the choked sound of her gasping for air between the horrible splattering sound of retching.  She stops before he makes it into the bathroom and he hears her moan, “No—Kylo don’t—”

Ben walks into the bathroom to see Kylo licking her vomit off the floor.

Ben grabs him by the collar and tugs him away and Kylo starts growling at him.

Ben freezes.  Rey freezes too.

Kylo doesn’t growl at Ben.  Not ever. At passing strangers, at other dogs, at the television, yes.  But never at Ben.

“I got him,” she says and she eases herself to her feet.  She takes Kylo’s collar from Ben’s hand and he starts whining as she pushes him out of the door to the bathroom and she closes it on him.

Then she turns back to the toilet, flushes it and drops her gaze down to the sick on the floor.  “Sorry I missed,” she mumbles. 

“Well, you’re gross,” Ben says gently, pulling her towards him and pressing a kiss to her temple.  She’s sweaty—probably because she’d just been violently ill. 

“If I’m gross, you’re gross,” she replies with a shaky laugh.  “I’m all vomity right now.”

“Hot,” he replies before bending down and grabbing cleaning supplies from under the sink.  

“I got it,” she says.

“You just threw up everywhere.  Go back to bed,” he tells her.

“No, I—”

“I got it,” he says firmly.  

She sits on the toilet while he cleans her sick off the floor and tugs the t-shirt she’d been wearing to bed up over her head and throws it in the hamper.  They return to the bedroom, she finds a different shirt, and curls up next to him. 

Kylo jumps up on the bed and nuzzles his way against her armpit and she pats him.  

“Sorry about the stomach bug I’m apparently about to give you,” she tells him.

“Hey, it could be food poisoning,” Ben says.

“We’ve had that Thai place a thousand times and it’s never been food poisoning before,” Rey mumbles sleepily.  “You just don’t want to be the one vomiting and then Kylo licks it up off the floor.”

“Correct,” Ben replies with a laugh.  

“Gross monster,” Rey sighs, patting the dog.  His tail thumps against the bed at her touch.

It’s not long before Rey is asleep again.  Rey sleeps like the dead, and can fall asleep easily.  Or rather, so she’s told him, easily if she’s sandwiched between him and Kylo.  

Ben’s never been like that, though.  Sleep is always elusive and he sighs as he glances at the clock on the bedside table for the first time since Rey had gotten sick.

_ Only 5am,  _ he thinks.  Could be worse, if he’s usually up at 6.  There are worse things to do than to lie in bed with Rey for an hour.

-

_ Stay home today.  You don’t want to give it to your students. _

She wakes to Ben’s text and sits up, preparing to reply but her stomach rolls and she’s running for the bathroom again.

This time, at least, she makes it fully to the toilet before bile and acid spew out of her mouth.  She hears the scrabbling of claws against the hardwood and a moment later Kylo is nudging his nose against her face, licking away the tears that she’d accidentally started crying as she’d vomited.

“I’m ok,” she tells the dog, stroking the soft spot behind his ears.  “I’m ok.”

She shudders as she looks at the toilet, flushes it and goes to rinse her mouth out again.  Her throat is raw twice over with that post-vomit rawness and, when she pours herself a cup of water to drink, it doesn’t soothe her the way she wants it to.

She clambers, sweaty and unhappy, back into bed and grabs her phone.

_ I just vomited again, so I’m not leaving. _

Immediately, she sees Ben start typing.  

_ I’ll pick up some tums on the way home.  Or something. _

_ It’s fine.  Hopefully it’ll be better soon. _

_ Kylo’s keeping me company. _

_ Did he try eating it again _

_ No, I made it to the toilet in time. _

The conversation fades away and Rey closes her eyes and breathes deeply.  Which, it turns out, helps nothing because it makes her stomach roll.

Annoyingly, it also starts grumbling with hunger after a while which Rey just thinks is unfair.  

She texts Ben,

_ Saltines _

_? _

_ Aren’t saltines supposed to be good when your stomach is bad? _

She’d heard that somewhere.

_ Gotcha _

On the bed next to her, Kylo is oddly still.  He is resting his head on her stomach and giving her the biggest puppy dog eyes every time she looks down at him.  She’s seen him be attentive when Ben’s been sick—she remembers it vividly from the days when she was still just the dog walker—and he’s always been kind of adorable when she’s been under the weather.  But not like this. Not growling at Ben for trying to pull him away from her vomit. 

“I’m ok,” she tells Kylo, patting him.  “It’s just food poisoning.”

She tries sleeping.  She tries eating too.  Oddly, it seems to calm her stomach, and after that she sets herself to checking her emails and trying to grade the problem sets for the class she’s TA-ing.  By the time that Ben comes home, her stomach feels almost entirely back to normal.

“Hey,” he says bending over the couch to kiss the top of her head.  “Tums, saltines, ginger ale.”

“Thanks,” she says, then stretches.  Ben’s already in the kitchen, putting them on the counter before going and grabbing Kylo’s leash.  “I do evenings,” she points out to him as Kylo leaps off the couch in excitement and pelts towards Ben, tail wagging.  It’s only when he does that that Rey realizes he hadn’t when Ben had come home. He’s usually so very excited whenever Ben comes home.  He may love Rey, and she knows that he does, but sometimes it’s almost like Kylo and Ben share a soul.

“You’re sick,” Ben says, looking up as he pats Kylo’s head.

“I feel better.”

“Yeah, but take your sick day.”

He leads Kylo to the front door and but stops because Kylo has frozen and is staring at Rey and whimpering.

“You saw me vomit twice,” she tells the dog, “Go with your dad.”

He whimpers again and walks towards Rey, reaching the end of his leash and whining even louder.

“Come on, bud,” Ben says and Kylo looks up at him.  Ben doesn’t tug at his collar the way he had that morning in the bathroom when Kylo had growled.  “She’ll be ok. It can be a quick walk.”

Kylo keeps whimpering and Rey gets up off the couch and he begins to wag his tail again.  She goes to the front door, opens it, and Kylo bursts out joyfully and she hugs Ben goodbye before closing the door after them.

It’s possibly she shortest walk that Kylo has ever gone on.  They’re back in four minutes.

“He didn’t want to cross the street,” Ben says, frowning as he unhooks Kylo’s leash and the dog pelts towards where Rey is still nestled on the couch and buries his face against her stomach.  “I swear I’ve never seen him poop spitefully before, but it was a defiant poop.”

“I’m a pied piper, what can I say,” Rey says, running her hands over Kylo’s ears as he looks up at her with big brown eyes.  “Were you making your dad’s life hard? Were you worried about me?” She bends over and rubs her face against his and he licks at her eagerly.  “Silly boy,” she tells him, kissing his nose. “I’m fine.”

-

She is not fine.

She wakes up in the middle of the night vomiting again, and Ben stumbles into the bathroom after her as she shakes and shudders and sobs over the toilet.  He does his best to rub her back, and be as soothing as he can be.

When she’s done she sits on the floor, pale and sweaty and there’s vomit in some of her hair.

“I thought it was gone,” she mumbles as Ben flushes and cleans while Kylo licks her face clean of tears.

“Shower?” Ben asks her.

“I don’t want to stand,” Rey replies.

“We can sit.”

She looks up at him forlornly and nods.  He helps her out of her clothes and they sit on the floor of the shower under the warm water, Rey in his lap while he holds her.  It’s a little cramped, but it’s worth it. He washes the vomit from her hair while she leans back against his chest.

“I hate being sick,” she says as the water from the shower rinses the shampoo from her hair.  “It’s not fair that you’re not vomiting everywhere.”

“I have a stronger constitution than you do,” he replies.

“Do not.”

“Do too.”

“Do not.”

He presses a kiss to her neck and she sighs and tilts her head back against his shoulder.  “Can I be better tomorrow, please?”

“I’d like that,” he says.  “Don’t get me wrong, I love you even when you’re gross—and this isn’t the grossest you’ve ever been—” she snorts, knowing he’s thinking of that time that she had brought the flu and a cold home from the university and had been a vomiting snot monster for about four days, “—but I don’t like that you’re miserable.”

She nods.  

He carries her back to bed and wraps her in some of his sweats because he feels bad that she’s sick—knowing he’ll regret it when she doesn’t give them back later but not really caring.  

-

Rey stays home for the rest of the week.  Her PI tells her—in no uncertain terms—that she is not to bring any sickness into the lab. 

_ I’ll come by and get your problem sets,  _ Finn texts her.

_ And run the risk of you getting this? _

_ If Solo doesn’t have it yet, I’ll take my chances. _

Rey can’t even give him shit about that.  Annoyingly, Ben has been totally fine while she’s been puking up everything she eats.  He’s been concerned, and supportive, and all of the things that she loves about him. But it’s very annoying that at the very least he’s not on the other side of this couch, moaning whenever he turns and forgets that his stomach is being dumb and sensitive too.

She’d half expected the vomit that Kylo had eaten that first night to make him sick too, but the dog just keeps cuddled against her.

Or he does, until Finn shows up with BB-8 in tow.

It’s hard to say whether Kylo likes other dogs.  Or other people. He’s made a lot of progress since Ben adopted him, but he will always get anxious when confronted with anyone who’s not his.  Rey and Ben think it’s a big deal that he will run around at the dog park now, when before he’d just bark at any other dog that came too close too quickly.

BB-8 is as close to a “friend” that Kylo has, Rey thinks, because they’d spent a lot of time and energy making sure he knew that Poe and Finn and Rose were friends, and BB-8 was a friend too, and also smaller and also nervous and also sweet.  They have doggy playdates, Kylo wags his tail whenever he catches BB-8’s scent on Rey when she comes home from visiting.

So Finn, Rey, and BB-8 stop short when, instead of wagging his tail and running over to say hi, Kylo stands his ground and growls as BB-8 approaches.

“Hey,” Rey says sharply to the dog.  “None of that now.”

BB practically squeaks in fear and darts behind Finn’s legs, poking her head out as she looks at Kylo with big eyes.  

“BB, sweetie, it’s all right.  He’s being weird because I’m sick,” Rey coos as she rounds Kylo and Finn to bend down and pet BB-8.  Behind her Kylo keeps growling. “Stop that,” she says to him again. Then she looks up at Finn.

“Has he ever gotten possessive of you before?” Finn asks, confused.

“Not like this.  He growled at Ben the other day too,” Rey tells him as she gets back to her feet.  “Not good character growth,” she throws over her shoulder at the dog, who is now coming to stand next to her, whining up at her and Finn.  She rolls her eyes. “Big baby. Doesn’t like it when I’m annoyed at him.” She looks down at Kylo. “I don’t like being annoyed at you, so stop growling at BB, ok?  BB’s your friend.”

“This just goes to show that that thing isn’t capable of friendship,” Finn grumbles.

“He’s sweet,” Rey replies.  “You said it yourself—he was nicer than you thought he was.”

“Yeah, but he regresses, apparently,” Finn says.  “I’ll get these out to your students.” He waves the p-sets at her.

“Thanks,” she replies sighing.

After Finn’s gone, she kneels down in front of Kylo.  “Are you regressing?” she asks him, stroking behind his ears.  “Are you nervous about something? What’s wrong, bud?”

He licks her face as a response and when she gets back on the couch he buries his face in her groin and huffs in what she thinks is a placated way.

-

The bug fades, thank god.  By Friday night when he gets back from work, Rey seems back to normal.  

“I didn’t vomit all day,” she glows up at him with a smile.  He loves her smile. It’s always so warm, so lovely, but today it’s particularly bright, presumably because she hasn’t been puking her guts up all day.

“Good,” he says, brushing some hair out of her face and pressing a kiss to her forehead.  She grabs the front of his shirt and tugs his lips down to hers. They eat, they take Kylo on a walk together, they watch a movie, they have sex, shutting Kylo out of the door as they strip one another out of their clothes and kiss their way across one another’s skin.

“It’s really hard to do this while he keeps whining,” Ben mutters, pausing mid-thrust and Rey rolls her eyes up at him.

“Listen, you don’t want him to get jealous.  We’ve been over this.”

“He’s not usually this whiney though,” Ben says, looking at the door.  He sees the shifting shadow of the great black dog as he paces outside.  

Rey reaches up and pulls his face back so that he’s looking at her again.  “He’ll just have to wait,” Rey says and she kisses him and he tries his best to put the dog from his mind.

It doesn’t work.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Ben groans when Kylo starts scratching at the door and Rey starts to giggle.  

“He doesn’t want you stealing his woman,” Rey teases as she contracts her muscles around him and his eyes sort of roll into the back of his head.  

“ _ His _ woman,” Ben snorts.

“Look—life’s simple and you lick things to claim them as your own and technically he did lick me before you did.”

Ben chokes out a laugh and Rey sucks on his neck.  

“He even put his head between my legs before you did, just saying.”

“Oh I’ll give you my head between your legs.”

And he does.  It’s easier to ignore Kylo with her thighs next to his ears, somehow, and when he slides back into her, she’s warm and soft and he feels safe with her.  He’s always felt safe with her.

_ Just like Kylo, _ he thinks as Rey gets up to pee and lets the dog into the room.  Usually he pelts onto the bed when she does this, but today he follows her to the bathroom while she pees before they both come back to bed and the dog burrows himself between the two of them and then proceeds to fart very strongly.

“Revenge,” Rey says even as Ben groans and buries his face in his pillow to avoid the smell.

He reaches a hand over and pets Kylo, and he feels Rey doing the same.  He finds her hand and squeezes it and they fall asleep like that, holding hands on Kylo’s back.

-

At the dog park the next day, Kylo sits down next to Rey the whole time.  

“He’s just being  _ weird _ ,” Rey says to Ben.  “Like when is he ever like this?”

She’ll be the first to admit that the dog park is a new thing for them.  It’s taken them a long time and lots of patience to get Kylo to the point where he can be around other dogs without barking, growling, attacking.  But whenever they’ve taken him to the dog park in the past, he’s always at least run around, even if he has tried to keep the other animals and humans at bay.  

He’s an energetic dog.  Huge and fighty. So that he’s just sitting there next to Rey, looking up at her as though afraid she’ll disappear—that’s weird.

“What if I’m dying?” she asks Ben.

“What?” he looks up from his phone where he’d been scrolling through Reddit.

“Isn’t there that one dog that’s like—famous for being able to smell cancer or something?”

“I thought it was a cat?” Ben says looking perplexed and immediately googling.

“What if I’m dying and that’s why I was vomity all week.  I have cancer and Kylo doesn’t want to lose me.”

“You don’t have cancer,” Ben says.

“But what if I do?”

“It was food poisoning.”

“Or stomach cancer.”

She kneels down next to Kylo who immediately starts licking her face.  “Am I dying?” she asks the dog.

Unhelpfully, he wags his tail.

As they are walking back to the house, Ben asks her quietly, “You don’t really think you’re dying, do you?”

She glances at him.

“No,” she says.  “But something’s weird.  I don’t know why he’s like this.  It’s not like it’s out of character for him to be possessive of me, but barking at BB-8 like he’d just met her?  Sitting in the dog park? You’ve got to admit that’s weird.”

Ben’s frown only deepens and his hand drifts to the small of her back and pulls her to him for a hug. He holds onto her a little more tightly than he usually does.

“Did I freak you out?” she asks him.  “Joking about dying like that?”

He doesn’t say anything.  He just kisses her, and it’s a deeper kiss than a Saturday afternoon walk back from the dog park really should merit and she can feel his heart hammering in his chest.   _ Both my boys—afraid I’ll die. _

Which is how Rey decides that if she gets sick again in the next two weeks she’s going to urgent care.

-

Rey’s asleep, Kylo’s curled up between them and Ben climbs up out of bed because he can’t sleep.

It’s past midnight and he grabs his laptop and heads out into the living room and goes onto Reddit, specifically, onto /r/dogs.

He hates Reddit, for the most part.  It’s full of assholes he wants to show he’s smarter than, which is a waste of his time.  But it’s great for things like /r/dogs and other cute animal subreddits and so long as he reminds himself never to check things like /r/politics, he can usually manage to avoid an aneurysm on the website.  

He doesn’t post a lot.  He’s mostly there as a quiet consumer of dog content.  But now he’s got a question and he sits there, typing for a while.

**_[Help] My Girlfriend thinks she’s dying because the dog won’t leave her side_ **

_ I got Kylo a few years ago.  He’s a rescue, and had a very abused past before I got him.  I met my girlfriend through him (she started off as a dog walker and was the only one who wasn’t afraid of Kylo).  We think he’s six now, although we’ll never really be sure.  _

_ We’ve been working really hard to make him calmer and more social, and he’s made a lot of progress in the past few years.  Then earlier this week, my girlfriend got this stomach bug and Kylo won’t leave her alone. He’s usually very protective of both of us, but he growled at me when I tried to clean up after she got sick, and he apparently growled at a friend’s dog when they came by to check on her (he’d been sort of getting to the point of “friends” with that dog) and then yesterday at the dog park, he wouldn’t run around, he just sat there next to her the whole time. _

_ My girlfriend now thinks she’s dying because she read some story about a cat at a nursing home who could sense when the residents were dying.  I think she’s overreacting. But Kylo is behaving strangely and is it just him getting spooked that she was sick? Or should we actually be taking her for a cancer screening or something? _

He reads it four times then hits post.  Then he waits.

He doesn’t expect a reply right away—it’s late in Central Time which makes it later in Eastern Standard, but he forgets, sometimes, that time zones mean that it’s morning in Australia.

_ Any chance your girlfriend is pregnant?  _ Is the literal honest to god first reply and it gets upvoted about four times in two minutes with a sub-reply of  _ When my wife got pregnant the dog would not leave her alone like at all.  Used to whine at her when she would close the door for the bathroom. _

_ Yeah they can smell hormonal shifts.  That stomach bug could have been morning sickness. _

Ben’s hands are shaking as he replies, saying,  _ She gets a shot every few months. _

_ I’d have her take a pregnancy test.  There isn’t a form of birth control that’s 100%, so it might not be likely, but I’d say that it’s more likely than cancer right now. _

Ben closes his computer and stares into the darkness for a few minutes, breathing very shakily.

Somehow—he’s sure—the internet is right.

He gets to his feet, grabs his coat and slips into his shoes.  He won’t be the first person to head to CVS past midnight in their pajamas looking for a pregnancy test.  Then, because he knows that Rey won’t wake up and he did get Kylo to help with his anxiety to begin with, he grabs Kylo’s leash and says into the darkness, “Hey buddy, wanna go?”

He hears Kylo’s dog tags tinkling in the darkness, the scrabble of claws against the wood and a moment later Kylo’s there with him.  “Sit.” And he does, so that Ben can put the leash on.

He wonders if Kylo’s leaving Rey’s side because he can smell Ben’s anxiety.  He bets that’s why, since—if Rey  _ is _ —oh god—pregnant—he wouldn’t even begin to blame the dog for wanting to protect the life inside her.

-

_ It’s not cancer, _ she tells herself as she rushes through the darkness to the bathroom to hurl her guts up once again.   _ It’s not cancer it’s not cancer. _

She shakes and shudders and retches again.  

Somewhere off in the house, she hears a door close, then hears the scramble of Kylo’s feet as he runs to the bathroom and starts licking vomit from the corner of her mouth before he moves on to the rest of her face.

“Hey,” she hears Ben say and he’s running his hands down her back.

“I’m going to urgent care,” Rey says.  “I don’t want to die.”

“I don’t think you’re dying,” he says, but he sounds anxious and she knows he’s trying to put on a brave face.  It makes her angrier.

“You’re not a doctor, you’re a software engineer,” she snaps.  “I might be dying. Why else would Kylo be the way he’s being? I haven’t been able to keep food down for almost a week.  I feel light-headed and—and—”

He’s wearing a jacket, she notices.  And Kylo’s got his leash on. And he’s got a bag from CVS.

“Were you out?” she asks him.

“Yeah,” he says.  “Reddit think you’re pregnant.”  And he takes a box out of the CVS bag.  Rey stares at it.

“Reddit—”

“Thinks your pregnant,” he says.  “I was asking if you had cancer because of how Kylo’s been.  They thought pregnant was more likely.”

Rey stares at the box in his hand for a long moment.   _ Pregnant. _

She doesn’t really know what to make of that.  Not at all.

_ A lot better than cancer. _

_ I’m so ill-equipped to be a mother.  I didn’t have one, how the hell am I supposed to… _

She looks at Ben.  His face is guarded but something about his expression makes her gather the strength to take the box from his hand and begin unwrapping it.  He flushes the toilet and wipes it down with clorox as she reads the instructions and, without waiting for him and Kylo to give her any privacy, she tugs her pajama pants down, sits on the toilet, and pees on the test.

It’s the longest two minutes of her life, waiting for the test to tell her something solid.  She doesn’t say anything. Ben doesn’t say anything. They just stay there in the bathroom, petting Kylo who seems to be very confused about why they’re all still there doing nothing.

When the time has passed they look.

“Better than cancer,” Rey says and she looks up at him.  His eyes are a bit dewy as he looks down at her. 

“Yeah,” he replies and a moment later she’s in his arms, holding him so tightly.  Her heart is hammering in her chest, her head is in overdrive.

_ Pregnant.  Pregnant. Pregnant.   _

“You don’t have to make a decision right away,” she hears him mumble into her hair.  “But do you want to keep it?”

She doesn’t have to consider—not even for a second.  

“Yes.”  She can work out what this means for the timing of her degree later, can work out what it means for the timing of her  _ life  _ later.  “Yes. I—I want a family.  I’ve always wanted a family.”  God, why is she crying? 

And he’s kissing her, his tongue tracing her mouth and his lips are smiling into hers.  “Yeah,” he says breathily between kisses. “Family.”

They make their way back to bed and Ben wraps himself around her, holding her close to his chest. 

Kylo jumps onto the bed and buries himself against Rey’s chest and she wraps her arms around him.  “You knew,” she tells him. “You magical, hyper sensitive dog.” Kylo’s tail thumps against the bed and Rey kisses his nose.  “You’re going to have to learn to chill though,” Rey informs him, “I know it’s your baby, but I can take care of myself.”

“His baby?” Ben huffs in amusement.

“Hate to break it to you—I’ve been cheating with Kylo this whole time.”

He laughs and kisses her neck and his hands press against her stomach and Rey hopes that her system gets better soon and stops making her want to vomit all the time because she really likes the sense of security she gets with Ben’s hands there.  

“I love you,” she tells him and he just kisses her neck and holds he tight and she’ll think about the rest tomorrow.  She’s happy here in this bed with her little family.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed this unexpected sequel!
> 
> I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/crossing_winter) and on [pillowfort](https://pillowfort.io/crossingwinter) if you wanna say hi!
> 
> Here's the graphic I posted to accompany this fic on both platforms above:


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